Mia Couto - The Tuner of Silences

— The world has come to an end, my children. Jezoosalem is all that’s left.

I believed what my father said. But Ntunzi thought the whole story crazy. Embittered, he probed persistently:

— So there’s no one else in the world?

Silvestre Vitalício took a deep breath, as if the answer required a great effort, and with a long, slow sigh, he murmured:

— We are the only ones left.

Vitalício was diligent, and devoted himself to our upbringing with great care and attention. But he made sure that his cares never gave way to tenderness. He was a man. And we were being schooled for manhood. We were the last and the only men. I remember that he would gently but firmly push me away when I tried to hug him:

— Do you close yours eyes when you hug me?

— I’m not sure, Father, I’m not sure.

— You shouldn’t do that.

— Close my eyes, Father?

— No, hug me.

In spite of his physical reserve, Silvestre Vitalício always fulfilled the role of maternal father, an ancestor in the present. I found his devotion strange. For his zeal contradicted everything that he preached. His dedication would only make any sense if there were, in some undisclosed place, a time full of future.

— But, Father, tell us, how did the world die?

— To tell you the truth, I can’t remember.

— But Uncle Aproximado. .

— Uncle tells a lot of stories. .

— Well then, you tell us, Father.

— It happened like this: the world finished even before the end of the world. .

The universe had come to an end without a spectacle, with neither thunderclaps nor flashes of lightning. It had withered away, exhausted by despair. This was how my father prevaricated on the subject of the cosmos’s extinction. First, the female places had begun to die: the springs, the beaches, the lagoons. Then, the male places had died: the towns, the roads, the ports.

— This was the only place left. This is where we’ve come to live for good.

To live? Surely, to live is to see dreams fulfilled, to look forward to receiving news. Silvestre didn’t dream, nor was he waiting for news. In the beginning, all he wanted was a place where no one would recall his name. Now, he himself could no longer remember who he was.

Uncle Aproximado would douse the flames of these paternal musings. His brother-in-law had left the city for banal reasons common to those who felt overcome by age.

— Your father complained that he could feel himself growing old.

Old age isn’t about one’s years: it’s fatigue. When we are old, everyone seems the same. That was Silvestre Vitalício’s lamentation. People and places had become impossible to differentiate from each other when he undertook his final journey. Other times — and there were so many other times — Silvestre would declare: life is too precious to be squandered in a disenthralled world.

— Your father is being very psychological —Uncle concluded. — He’ll get over it one of these days.

Days and years passed and father’s ravings continued. In time, Uncle showed up less and less. As for me, his growing absences pained me, but my brother disabused me:

— Uncle Aproximado isn’t the person you think he is —he warned me.

— I don’t understand.

— He’s a jailer. That’s what he is, a jailer.

— What do you mean by that?

— That dear little uncle of yours is the one who’s guarding this prison we’re being kept in.

— And why should we be in prison?

— Because of the crime.

— What crime, Ntunzi?

— The crime our father committed.

— Don’t say such a thing, brother.

All those tales our father invented about why we had abandoned the world, all those cock-and-bull stories had one purpose in mind: to befuddle us and remove us from our memories of the past.

— There’s only one truth: our old man is running away from the law.

— So what crime did he commit, then?

— One day I’ll tell you.

Whatever the reason for our exile, it was Aproximado who had led our retreat to Jezoosalem eight years before, driving us there in his rickety old truck. Uncle knew the place we were heading for. He had once worked on this reserve as a game warden. Uncle knew all about wild animals and guns, bush-lands and forests. While he drove us along in his old wreck, his arm dangling out of the window, he lectured us on the wiles of animals and the secrets of the bush.

That truck — the new Noah’s Ark — reached its destination, but breathed its last at the door of what would become our home. It was there that it rotted away, and there that it became my favourite toy, the refuge for my dreams. Sitting behind the wheel of the lifeless machine, I could have invented infinite journeys, conquered distances and obstacles. Like any other child, I could have travelled right round the planet until the whole world hung on my word. But this never happened: my dream had never learnt to travel. He who has always lived stuck in one place doesn’t know how to dream of anywhere else.

With my capacity for illusion diminished, I eventually perfected other defences against nostalgia. In order to deceive the slowness of the hours, I would declare:

— I’m off to the river!

What usually happened was that no one heard me. Even so, I got so much pleasure from the announcement that I went on repeating it while I headed towards the valley. On the way there, I would pause in front of a lifeless telegraph pole that had been erected, but had never got as far as working. All the other poles that had been stuck in the ground had turned into green shoots and were now trees with magnificent foliage. This particular pole was the only one standing there like a skeleton, solitary in the face of infinity. That pole, according to Ntunzi, wasn’t a post stuck in the ground: it was the mast of a ship that had lost its sea. That was why I always gave it a hug, as if seeking comfort from an old member of the family.

I would linger by the river in far-ranging reveries. I would wait for my brother who, at the end of the afternoon, would come down to bathe. Ntunzi would strip off his clothes and stand there, defenceless, gazing at the water with exactly the same look of yearning as when I saw him contemplating the suitcase that he packed and unpacked every day. Once, he asked me:

— Have you ever been under the water, sonny boy?

I shook my head, aware that I didn’t understand the depth of his question.

— Under the water —Ntunzi said, — you see things you’d just never imagine.

I couldn’t decipher my brother’s words. But little by little, I got the idea: the most truly living thing in Jezoosalem was that nameless river. When it came down to it, the ban on tears and prayers had a purpose. My father wasn’t as unhinged as we thought. If we had to pray or weep, it was to be right there, on the riverbank, upon bended knee on the wet sand.

— Father always says the world has died, doesn’t he? Ntunzi asked.

— But Father says so many things.

— It’s the opposite, Mwanito. It’s not the world that died. We’re the ones who died.

I shivered. I felt a chill pass through me, from my soul to my flesh, and from my flesh to my skin. So was death itself the place where we lived?

— Don’t say such a thing, Ntunzi. It scares me.